The Aesthetic of Place in the American Play-Cycle
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THE AESTHETIC OF PLACE IN THE AMERICAN PLAY-CYCLE by Erin Lea Naler APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ R. Clay Reynolds, Chair ___________________________________________ Fred Curchack ___________________________________________ Jessica C. Murphy ___________________________________________ Marilyn Waligore Copyright 2017 Erin Lea Naler All Rights Reserved to my father for the taste of land and the gift of place THE AESTHETIC OF PLACE IN THE AMERICAN PLAY-CYCLE by ERIN LEA NALER, BS, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES—AESTHETIC STUDIES THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS May 2017 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been honored to work with many artists and scholars who have poured their time and talent into my life, resulting in this study of community. Before all things this is an artifact of the places that have provided me a community—sometimes nurturing, sometimes chaotic, but always beautiful. To my artist community—who taught me to embrace fear and failure. To my family—who taught me to live abundantly in tension at the border of the city and the field. To my faith community—whose generosity has no edge. To the scholars who helped me see, my teachers and committee members, Marilyn Waligore, Fred Curchack, and Jessica Murphy. And most importantly to Clay Reynolds who taught me to write and helped me find my voice. October 2016 v THE AESTHETIC OF PLACE IN THE AMERICAN PLAY-CYCLE Publication No. ___________________ Erin Lea Naler, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2017 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Dr. R. Clay Reynolds Playwrights of the American play-cycle represent their characters’ displacement and attempt to cure that displacement through a return to a rootedness in place. The play-cycle form demonstrates a unique theatre narrative that insists on an aesthetic of place. The play-cycle is viewed through contemporary American agrarian writers concerned with rootedness in place, Yi- Fu Tuan’s geographic explorations of space and place, and Edward S. Casey’s seminal philosophical discussion of place as the primary experience of human identity. August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle—ten decades of the African American experience in Pittsburg’s Hill District— demonstrates the place-making effects of food. While Horton Foote uses built structures to place his characters in their Costal Plains town of Harrison, Texas, in The Orphan’s Home Cycle. Because the play-cycle performance is intended to require an extended embodied commitment to a locale by an audience and performer community, the form suits Yi-Fu Tuan’s dictum “place is pause.” The theatre that rises out of this pause-inducing form both compels a place narrative and attempts to cure audience displacement creating an encompassing aesthetic of place. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................... v Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1 In The First Place ........................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 Sessions of Emplacement in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle ................................. 35 Chapter 3 Localized Caring in Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle ............................... 115 Chapter 4 Coming Full Circle: The Play-Cycle Comes Into Place ............................................ 182 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 192 Biographical Sketch .................................................................................................................... 201 Curriculum Vitae vii CHAPTER 1 IN THE FIRST PLACE In the first place there is depth. Primal depth, at once constituted and discovered by body, yields places. Places, gathered into a detotalized totality, yield world. Neither space nor time—nor universe—issues from these origins, except by way of abstraction and attenuation. Only a misplaced, or more exactly an unplaced, concreteness leads to such universalist terms, as consistent as they are superficial. But an implaced concreteness, bodily bound, engenders a world in depth. To be in the world, to be situated at all, is to be in place. —Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World Stark Young, a mid-century theatre critic, introduces an aesthetic of the optimum and local when he observes that “significant” theatre is not limited to a global, prescriptive form, but takes on an optimum form (old or new, traditional or experimental) that best suits the artistic impulse of the playwright (Theatre 58). The form does not exist to be fleshed out with a plot, but rather the plot dictates the form of the drama: “It follows then that the supreme thing in the theatre is the arrival of a work of art in which we perceive that an idea has found a theatrical body to bring it into existence. The more significant the idea the more significant the work of art” (58). The form of the play-cycle in the American theatre is not just an extended attempt at storytelling; rather, following Young’s suggestion, it is the optimum form for the playwright’s artistic impulse—an impulse that seeks a connection to place. 1 2 The play-cycle’s form is well represented in the western theatre: beginning with the Greeks (the Theban cycle, the Oresteia), the English mystery plays (York Cycle, Wakefield Cycle, Chester Cycle, N-Town Cycle), William Shakespeare’s Henriad, W. B. Yeats’ Cuchulain Cycle of the Irish Literary Renaissance, and the American play-cycle, with notable examples in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle (or Century Cycle) and Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle. Flourishing after the explosion of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century, the play-cycle of the American theatre is a critical and unique development of the cycle form, themes, and portrayal of place. Rather than contributing further to the modernist movement in the American theater represented by Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920), Susan Glaspell’s The Verge (1921), Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (1928), or Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923), the play-cycle represents a decidedly antimodern reaction to modern displacement. In 1952, Joseph Wood Krutch gave a series of lectures at Cornell University on the advent of modernism in the theatre. In his lecture, published as “Modernism” in Modern Drama, he identified Henrick Ibsen as the playwright who popularly introduced modernism in the drama—a claim that anyone who has read an introductory theatre history textbook would recognize. For Krutch, Ibsen’s modernism, while not the first example in drama, was the most widely seen and read.1 Nora’s final door slam in A Doll’s House signaled a break with the past— a chasm appeared in time that cut off continuity between the past and the future: “Thereafter the concept of the past as the enemy of the future and of the present, the conviction that we must 1 Krutch acknowledges that while not the first to introduce modernism, “Ibsen was the first fully effective exponent of the idea, he did not either invent it or even first introduce it into the drama” (6). 3 attempt some sort of difficult leap across the chasm which separated the two, became a dominant idea, almost an obsession” (6). George Bernard Shaw affirmed Ibsen’s modernity, which showed a discontinuity with the past, in his book The Quintessence of Ibsenism, published for the first time in 1891 and reissued with a new Preface and additional chapters in 1913, thirty-four years after the premier of A Doll’s House. Ibsen’s plays are part of a body of European art that “now form a Bible far surpassing in importance to us the ancient Hebrew Bible that has served us so long. I think Ibsen has proved the right of the drama to take scriptural rank, and his own right canonical rank as one of the major prophets of the modern Bible” (50). According to Shaw, Ibsen’s drama represents a break with past sacred texts, forming a new modern sacred text that will guide humanity into the future. Krutch, however, identifies a group of early twentieth-century playwrights who were continuously negotiating this chasm between the past and the future—some of whom didn’t write narratives of discontinuity, but wrote narratives that identified the chasm while, at the same time, suggested a need to retain continuity with the past. He called these playwrights antimodernists. In a variety of ways they pulled from the past in order to find a path to humanity’s success in the future. He identifies several playwrights from the Irish Literary Renaissance as antimodernists because of their “avowed . resistance to naturalism and to the dominance of Ibsen” (93). John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and Lady Gregory were concerned with reviving their regional folk culture as a way to speak to moderns—art “is essentially national with its roots in a folk culture . every writer should put his roots down in his own country and draw his strength from the spirit of his race” (94). Krutch makes the claim 4 that “the Abbey Theatre was founded as an antimodernist movement and that in Synge it found a playwright who successfully detached himself from